Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) is a first-person shooter game developed by Epic Games and published by Midway Games. It's part of the Unreal series of games and it uses the Unreal Engine 3, the latest of the Unreal engines. You can also buy UT3 via Steam. Ut3 is the 4th game in the Unreal Tournament series and it's the 8th for the Unreal game, has UT3 stayed loyal to it's franchise delivering fast-paced action, bleeding-edge graphics, and a no-brainer control system?

Requirements

• Microsoft Windows XP/Vista
• 2.0 GHz single core CPU (2.4 GHz dual core CPU or faster recommended)
• 512 MB RAM (1.0 GB RAM or greater recommended)
• 8.0 GB hard disk drive space
• NVIDIA 6200 or ATI 9600 video card (NVIDIA 7800GTX or ATI X1300 or faster recommended)
• DirectX 9.0c compliant sound card

Installation

I bought Unreal Tournament 3 via Steam which makes it as easy as eating a sandwich to install. The very first time that you run UT3, it'll give you your key which you need to key-in later after the game has started. You also need to create or use your GameSpy ID account to be able to play online. Once you've done that, there's nothing more to do than to play the game.

First Impressions

I'm an FPS player by heart and I've played the original Unreal Tournament the first time it came out. To me the original UT was refreshing especially if you came from Quake which gives maps a dark eery feeling. For UT though, it was a tad more colourful so I never thought of it as a Quake rip-off.

At first I thought I had to learn a couple of new keys i.e. two new keys for leaning over since newer games tend to do that nowadays and to be honest, I hate those especially in multiplayer since I just hate having to think about what I have to press next to kill my opponent. Fortunately UT3 does not bombard you with new keys to remember. It's a good old fashioned FPS shooter which I think was a right move by the developers.

Single-Player

The campaigns and skirmish modes probably my favorite part of the game especially since these types of games nowadays are geared towards multiplayer. It's more like once you've finished singleplayer, it's time to move on to multiplayer. And sometimes I just want to take a break and start a quick game with bots. The bots themselves aren't too bad either especially at the higher levels, you can still kill them but for a newbie it's like impossible until you learn the ropes properly.

One more thing that I want to talk about is that you can ride a bunch of vehicles in UT3 and the controls aren't that flimsy either. It takes a little bit of getting used to which should probably last a couple of minutes. If you haven't noticed yet the outdoor environment look awesome! It doesn't look like Crysis but the UT3 engine does a good job of making you feel a bit sci-fi with this game.

If you expect to find a lot of people online like Counter-Strike, Battlefield, Team Fortress, et. al. then you're wrong. There's hardly anyone online. Call me an elitist but I don't play in servers that ping above 60. And even if I increase my tolerance to 120 you'll just end up with servers filled with bots. It's pretty much singleplayer with added latency which is very disappointing considering that the game has been out for awhile now.

Final Thoughts

I pretty much enjoyed playing UT3 although I have to say that it messed up my reactions forother FPS games and I have to get used to them again after a UT3 run. If you've bought this game through Steam then you also get the chance to receive UT3 Achievements. This helps the replayability of a game since there's just some players out there who wants to get a hold of everything.

Ratings

Installer - Steam definitely makes like easy for you. And you get to take it with you whenever you go mobile...no CD/DVD's whatsoever.

Graphics - Indoors and outdoor environments look awesome. Sometimes I just want to stop fragging and just explore the area.

Sound - Sound effects and player voices could use some more variety.

Gameplay - The controls are simple enough that anyone that knows what WASD means will learn how to play UT3 in a couple of minutes. What's kinda sad though is the multiplayer part of UT3, there's a lot of game servers out there...there's just not enough players to play with.